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Flash fiction is a style of fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category.
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Come in, the Water’s Lovely I’ve squatted here for years, long as I can remember. Sometimes the place lets the rain in and sometimes it cracks at the edges after a dry spell. I’ve got a collection of Carling cans in one corner, an old bike frame dressed in weeds out the back. The rats don’t bother me now, the fish never last long, and the ducks make a racket but give me something to watch. But today is different. The first scorching day of summer when everyone feels like peeling off their skin and there’s never enough ice cream vans to go round. The river is starting to hum, a vinegary tang of mould but that doesn’t stop the kids. I hear them, the yells, the pounding of trainers on sticky tarmac as they build up speed running down the hill. They poke me with sticks, nothing too vicious, it’s not like they know I’m here. Only I can’t help hoping one of them will come a little closer. Just a step. The mud sucks at their ankles. It gets lonely down here, my bones ache with the damp, and it doesn’t feel good to be forgotten. The boy with the red T-shirt is leaning too far over. The river’s flowing too fast. A little company wouldn’t go amiss, someone to talk to on black frozen nights when the creak of branches and the crack of ice reminds me of my last minutes up there. One more step. Come in, the water’s lovely.
I’m coming home again soon and I know I should visit you. But time will run short as usual. There will be nieces to take out, family to eat with, and friends to see. I will probably end up postponing your visit until next time. Next time: it’s easy to keep up the excuses when I pretend you are invincible. Seeing you tucked in the corner in a plastic-coated chair surrounded my old women will just remind me that somehow you have been pushed out of your own time. Left stranded like the skeletal hulls of wrecked boats in the picture outside your room. You look like a different man in those photograph albums tucked under your bed. I don’t think I ever thought about you as a person with your own life and your own history. You were always just my granddad. I heard tales about your boxing matches, the Machiavellian father, and the shame of wearing second-hand postman trousers with the yellow stripe blacked-out to the dizzying pride of knock-out matches on air bases. There is even a picture of you being paraded like a trophy. The bruises have faded but the punches and the blows left their mark on you. And really we should have seen it coming. I remember the stories about Sunday lunches when your dinner would end up all over the walls, one Christmas Day when you decided to rip out the chimney. Only it wasn’t until the phone calls about the lost keys, the missed appointments, and the misplaced car that anyone stopped to think that you might be losing the fight. The photographs I like best show you boxing shadows, muscles thick and piled high as bricks, your neck as wide as your head. When I shut my eyes that is how I picture you even though I never knew you then. Only when I close the albums the picture is very different. At first I would visit you in your house but eventually the plastic bottles hidden behind doors and the un-slept in bed gave way to a smaller supervised flat. You never quite settled there, too much of a strain to work out where the light switches were or how to turn off the gas. You were a builder but I remember you standing in the middle of the room unable to locate the spot where a door handle might logically be. I think we even laughed because we didn’t know what else to do. Finally you found a place in a home that isn’t really your home. But I know you won’t be able to last there for long. You will shout just a little too loudly or simply crumple to the floor one day. Featherweight as you are no one will be able to pick you up. I can wrap my hand around your arm now but I don’t like to get that close. The place makes me sweat when I walk through the door and it’s not just because the heat is turned up and the windows always shut. It’s because I know that when one round is over another will follow. Sometimes I look at my dad and think will he be next and it makes my stomach contract like a snapped elastic band. Only worse are the moments when I think if it isn’t him then it must be me; I don’t think I’m ready to step into the ring with that. I should have listened more carefully and asked more questions. I know you tried your best, always kept your head down and your guard up, the pictures show me that. It would easy to lose all the good things you have done in the lies you spun. But I understand now they weren’t so much ways of hiding the truth as ways of pretending you were winning that you could remember where you put your keys and who came to tea. You are still with us. We visit when we can and make-up excuses why we can’t, bring you presents at Christmas, and take you out on your birthday. But it isn’t really you. My granddad isn’t in that plastic-coated chair, with fingers that can’t uncurl and a head that can’t sit straight. He’s trapped in those black and white pictures. I’m just sorry I came too late to let him out.
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